Hmm, I think they're close enough to be able to say a neural network is modelled on how a brain works - it's not the same, but then you reach the other side of the semantics coin (like the "can a submarine swim" question).

The plasticity part is an interesting point, and I'd need to research that to respond properly. I don't know, for example, if they freeze the model because otherwise input would ruin it (internet teaching them to be sweaty racists, for example), or because it's so expensive/slow to train, or high error rates, or it's impossible, etc.

When talking to laymen I've explained LLMs as a glorified text autocomplete, but there's some discussion on the boundary of science and philosophy that's asking is intelligence a side effect of being able to predict better.

[–] trollbearpig@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

Nah man, they don't freeze the model because they think we will ruin it with our racism hahaha, that's just their PR bullshit. They freeze them because they don't know how to make the thing learn in real time like a human. We only know how to use backpropagatuon to train them. And this is expected, we haven't solved the hard problem of the mind no matter what these companies say.

Don't get me wrong, backpropagation is an amazing algorithm and the results for autocomplete are honestly better than I expected (though remeber that a lot of this is just underpaid workers in africa that pick good training data). But our current understanding of how human learns points to neuroplasticity as the main mechanism. And then here come all these AI grifters/companies saying that somehow backpropagation produces the same results. And I haven't seen a single decent argument for this.